Nokia 6760 slide smartphone

Sporting an unconventional design that houses one of the largest full QWERTY keyboards we've seen on a smartphone, Nokia's 6760 slide is definitely different. Though its compact size and comfortable keyboard are impressive, the 6760 slide has too many faults for us to recommend it.

The Nokia 6760 slide is one of the most compact slider phones we've reviewed, yet it houses one of the largest QWERTY keyboards we've seen. Its matte black plastic body with yellow highlights and rubber edging looks quirky, and the chrome edging surrounding the keyboard is a nice touch.

Unfortunately, the Nokia 6760 slide's build quality is questionable at best. The slider rattles in both open and closed positions, and emits a clattering sound when opened. The plastic body feels cheap and hollow and the battery cover creaks when pressed. The 6760 slide feels like the plastic dummy phones you see in stores. The odd design has also resulted in quite a small display that has poor viewing angles and is hard to see in direct sunlight. There is no way to dial a phone number with the slider closed.

The phone slides open to the right, automatically orienting the screen to landscape mode. The recessed rubber strip on the bottom makes it easy to slide open with your thumb and is a nice design touch. Despite the questionable build quality, the 6760 slide is comfortable to hold in either portrait or landscape modes and the shortcut buttons (Web, menu and messaging) are well placed for both orientations. Along with the five-way navigational pad and selection buttons, these plastic keys require a rather firm press to activate.

The backlit QWERTY keyboard with slightly raised rubber keys is without doubt the best feature of the 6760 slide. We particularly liked the large space bar and the shift and symbol keys — these are well situated and easy to press quickly. It may take a while to adjust to the size of the keyboard, as pressing a key on the far left or right requires a fair stretch of your thumb. The 6760 slide's compact design makes it comfortable to text with two hands, but single handed typing is awkward at best.

Apart from its unique design, most of the 6760 slide's features are available on other Nokia phones running the Symbian S60 UI. A row of shortcuts on the home screen can include Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace but these are merely links to the mobile Web pages of these sites, rather than dedicated apps. The built-in accelerometer works well when opening and closing the slider, and the interface in general feels swift.

A 2.5mm headphone jack means the Nokia 6760 slide is a rather limited multimedia handset. The included headphones lack bass and clarity and you'll need to purchase an adapter should you wish to use your own pair. This will also affect the FM radio, as the bundled headphones act as an antenna. A 3.2-megapixel camera is also included, but the lack of flash makes night time photography impossible and the photos suffer from image noise and poor colour reproduction.

The Nokia 6760 slide is a 3G-capable phone, but lacks Wi-Fi. A GPS receiver is built-in; Google Maps is not preinstalled but can be quickly downloaded. One annoyance is the fact that the phone can't be charged via the micro-USB port — instead the 6760 slide uses the older style, proprietary Nokia charging connection.

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